Comment by crims0n
4 hours ago
It is really disheartening to see the sentiment around privacy erode like this. Fifteen or even ten years ago this would have been unanimously and vehemently opposed, but now it is somehow up for debate?
4 hours ago
It is really disheartening to see the sentiment around privacy erode like this. Fifteen or even ten years ago this would have been unanimously and vehemently opposed, but now it is somehow up for debate?
There has been 15 more years of highly motivated psychologists tuning their social media systems to create addiction, time for those who've grown up through this to become adults, foreign interference with democracy etc.
Though I think banning it for children is the wrong approach. Ban the addictive and dangerous features for everyone, adults included — no more infinite scroll, and no more feeds showing content from outside social connections.
> no more feeds showing content from outside social connections
So, kill all news agencies and reporters I guess? or would there be a carve out for incumbents so they can cement their market share? who controls the approval list?
News agencies don’t do personalized curation. Every reader, at least from the same city, gets exactly the same content.
1 reply →
Ban infinite scroll? Sounds like a slippery slope and also hard to enforce. I don't even know how you would craft such a law.
This is far more to do with different people having different definitions for what constitutes a genocide with one very well funded minority group having a large stake in their version being the accepted one.
> tuning their social media systems to create addiction
Except this has nothing to do with social media nor with children nor with addiction.
The first sentence of the article "under-16 social media ban".
Social media got worse.
We've had time to witness the damage of a dopamine-doomscroll. I personally know children who've posted too much, and children who've been solicited directly by adults, both to try and meet and for nudes. And we've seen the complete lack of positive action from platforms. Roblox is full of paedophiles and Grok was letting you nudify your classmates just a few months ago. These places aren't suitable for kids.
I don't want a ban on VPNs. That isn't being suggested, just making sure they're also age-checked. But some inconvenience is a price worth considering.
I love how every harm you listed, is a platform design problem, and your fix touches none of it. A kid bypassing VPN age checks can still doomscroll and Roblox all day on a school wifi with no VPN at all. The only thing you've actually accomplished is stripping privacy and security from every adult who isn't a child abuser, to feel like you did something about the ones who are.
Requiring ID (which is what age gating is) for VPNs is absurd. Given that SSH can act as a proxy service, are you going to require all ssh connections out of the country to be age verified?
Facial modeling has been good enough for porn.
I'd be surprised if the law requires much beyond a vague best effort from service providers, but many already block connections from known server hosts and some even VPNs.
An airtight block is not what's required; stopping social media being mainstream for kids is.
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Maybe they should get the pedos out of the government instead of a foolish attempt at restricting and harming everyone else? It's not ever going to protect or make children safer. It never was.
Who are the 'pedos' in government?
Why doesn't it make children safer?
I'm trying to discuss this in good faith but that wasn't even an argument. A bland accusation wearing a tin foil hat.
2 replies →
You want age checking, you want ids .
> But some inconvenience is a price worth considering.
You're trying to frame it as an "inconvenience" and not a blatant attack on the fundamental freedom of expression. I get that social media is bad, but sometimes (often) the cure is worse than the illness.
> Social media got worse.
Sure, whatever. Maybe in some ways.
> I personally know children who've posted too much, and children who've been solicited directly by adults, both to try and meet and for nudes.
... but not in that way.
I personally knew children who'd been solicited directly by adults before there was even an Internet. Including me, if you use the definition of "child" that seems to be popular in this sort of debate (and, by the way, it wasn't a big deal).
We did not shut down the world because of it.
They've somehow managed to breed several generations who's only criteria for "computing" is "it just works". All consumption, little-to-no understanding of how stuff works. As long as it does what it does, and it's "free", that's all that matters.
More like the dumb people keep breeding and the magic rocks keep showing pretty colors
> disheartening to see the sentiment around privacy erode like this
Coders went from being civically active—calling their electeds and showing up to events to defend privacy in the 90s—to being comfortably rich and content with maybe voting in generals. That’s had a direct effect on policy quality.
Us peasants cannot stop this, Canada will roll this out soon also, its being rammed through no matter what people feel.
In terms of political power, programmers are more like yeomen than peasants. Yeomen have power due to their essential skills because if a good fraction of them stopped working the system would collapse. (Whereas if peasants stop working, they just starve.) If a sufficient number of programmers said "We're not going to implement or support privacy-invading systems" the government would have to back down.
[dead]
Opposed, yeah right. People don't care back then just as they don't now. Only small groups of technical users like us care.